Rag Time

What I bought last summer.

I’ll admit that I lost interest in Frenchy’s for a number of years, once we got the scarecrow outfitted. In 1972, our family had started spending summers in a fishing village on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, and the scarecrow, which our daughters named Mildew, came our way maybe eight or nine years after that. Mildew was a castoff from an extended family of scarecrows that appeared every spring in the vegetable garden of a retired man named Mr. Dalton, whose creations were eventually included in a picture book of Nova Scotia scarecrows, entitled “Outstanding in Their Fields.” She had absorbed enough punishment from Maritime weather to be below Mr. Dalton’s standards, but the girls were delighted to have her, even in her decrepit condition. In fact, her condition was a plus, since it presented the opportunity to dress her. We drove into Liverpool, a town not far from our village, to find her some new clothes. That’s where Frenchy’s came in.

We were already familiar with Frenchy’s, whose stores had begun to appear in small towns in the Maritimes about the time we settled into our house on the South Shore. We knew that it had been founded by a man in the rag trade—not the rag trade as the term is sometimes used in New York to mean the garment industry; the man traded in rags—and I had heard that Frenchy’s was a last shot at selling dresses and skirts and sports coats and trousers before they made a sort of reverse butterfly transmogrification from something you might wear to the office party to something you might use to apply polish to your shoes.

As I later discovered, a number of American companies sell huge bales of clothing—mostly used clothing that may have been dropped into a charity donation box at the mall or forgotten at the dry cleaner’s, but also some new clothing. The buyers of such bales tend to sort out some of the contents for markets in Third World countries and sell the rest as what the trade refers to as “wipers.” What Frenchy’s began doing with its baled clothing was to sort out some garments suitable for Maritime customers and offer great unruly piles of them in bins labelled “PANTS” or “BLOUSES” or “MEN’S SHIRTS.” Among the bins at the Liverpool Frenchy’s, we found Mildew a green dress, a hat, a purse, and a pair of boots—not the floppy sort of boots that the fishermen wore but swanky patent-leather boots, with high heels. The cost of this makeover was five or six dollars.

Mildew’s outfit was the extent of our Frenchy’s shopping at the time. In Nova Scotia, there has never been reason for anyone in our family to think much about wardrobe. Sufficient T-shirts and jeans accumulated in our house over the years. My main clothing problem was trying to remember every spring whether I’d left any vaguely presentable sports shirts in Nova Scotia the previous fall. In those days, we discussed Frenchy’s only when we were visited by a friend of ours named Judy, who was the high-school librarian in Liverpool. On her way home from Frenchy’s, Judy would sometimes stop by to show off the school clothes she’d snatched from one of the bins for her children. Unlike just about everyone else in our village, Judy had grown up in a good-sized city, and she had some familiarity with clothing labels. She’d hold up a skirt she had bought for one of her daughters—sometimes a brand-new skirt, with the plastic string that had held the price tag still attached—and say simply, “Ann Taylor” or “Calvin Klein” or “Gap.”

She didn’t have to say how much she had paid. At Frenchy’s, all skirts are priced the same, and that is also true of, say, all sweaters or all dresses or all overcoats. The Frenchy’s store that Judy patronized has closed, but at a similar store in Liverpool called Guy’s Frenchy’s skirts are now three dollars and sixty-five cents Canadian. Dresses are four fifty-five. Men’s shirts or women’s blouses are three dollars. Evening gowns are nine dollars. A sports coat is five twenty-five. If it is an orange sports coat with a stain on the lapel, it is five twenty-five. If it is what appears to be a brand-new Ralph Lauren sports coat, it is five twenty-five. Sports coats are five twenty-five.

I am not averse to wearing a sports coat that costs five twenty-five. My basic position on clothing was formed in high school, in Kansas City, where my male classmates and I considered an intense interest in expensive clothing to be not exactly frivolous—after all, most of what we did was frivolous—but, well, sort of la-di-da. I suppose we also considered it unmanly; we took a broad view of what was unmanly. (Not that we didn’t have our own rigid beliefs about what constituted proper dress and, in particular, what did not. The contempt that a professionally snooty fashion-magazine editor might have for someone who shows up at a New York charity benefit in last year’s color could not exceed the contempt we had for someone who was seen in jeans other than Levi’s or Lee’s.) One of my high-school classmates had a phrase for someone who wore spiffy and expensive clothes—a “suave dog,” with the “suave” pronounced as if it rhymed with “wave.” (We didn’t have a lot of opportunity to hear words like that spoken out loud.) Even now, many decades later, the sight of a dandy at, say, a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan catapults into my mind the phrase “suave dog”—or “swayve dog,” really, since it comes complete with the Southwest High School pronunciation.

When I was in college, at Yale, the Levi’s or Lee’s bluejeans equivalents were tweed sports coats and gray flannels and khakis. I was impressed with the commandment of one of my freshman-year roommates, an amiable boarding-school graduate with three last names, that the only comment a gentleman’s outfit should generate is that he is properly dressed for the occasion. Following that commandment meant acquiring some new clothes, some of them secondhand, since the Ivy style, as it was then sometimes called, had not yet penetrated as far as Kansas City. In those days, Yale believed that proper dress for the occasion of having dinner in Freshman Commons included a coat and tie, so I bought a rather ragged sports coat from my roommate for two dollars and seventy-five cents, and I wore it regularly to dinner. Although my daughters, who are now grown, may suspect otherwise, I would like to state for the record that I no longer own it.

On the other hand, the sports coats I do own closely resemble it. You could say that, when it comes to what some fashionistas would call my “look,” I considered one adjustment—from high school to college—quite sufficient. Remember what Lillian Hellman told the House Committee on Un-American Activities? “I cannot, and will not, cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” I feel that way about my clothes. My idea of what to wear to dinner has not changed much over the years, nor have I abandoned my high-school belief that spending a lot of money on clothes is, well, la-di-da. (I wouldn’t want to be questioned closely about whether I still also find it unmanly.) In other words, I may embody the target audience of Brooks Brothers factory-outlet stores— a thrifty fellow whose tastes are mired in the fifties.

As it happens, Brooks Brothers factory-outlet stores have received a good deal of my custom. On the way home to New York from Nova Scotia, we’d stop in Kittery, Maine, which had become an outlet center—a stop I became much more enthusiastic about after we happened into a place called Bob’s Clam Hut, across the highway from the Villeroy & Boch outlet. While the girls were picking up a lot of school clothes, I’d wander over to the Brooks Brothers outlet to top up my supply of blue button-down shirts and, more or less in synch with Presidential-election years, buy a sports coat or a blazer. If we stopped off at Freeport, which had also become an outlet center, I would go to the mother church of L. L. Bean, the anchor that had attracted the outlets in the first place, and pick up a couple of pairs of khakis and some sports shirts. By the time we crossed into New Hampshire every fall, I was, sartorially speaking, good to go.

The Frenchy’s finds that Judy displayed had, in fact, included brand-new garments from L. L. Bean. Still, I continued to think of Frenchy’s stores as something akin to thrift shops—those foul-smelling storefronts I’d visited from time to time in search of out-of-print books. I took no notice when, because of a split in management, the Frenchy’s stores in our area began to be supplanted by similar but brighter stores, called Guy’s Frenchy’s—not, as innocent travellers might assume, a Frenchy’s for men’s clothing which had a misplaced apostrophe but a Frenchy’s named for an Acadian from Digby named Guy LeBlanc. Frenchy’s, which is what everyone I knew continued to call both Guy’s Frenchy’s and the original Frenchy’s, was not at the forefront of my mind. Then, during the summer before last, the summer of 2005, all of that changed.

What brought Frenchy’s to my attention again was that a woman I know in Liverpool named Kate Killam had decided to become, in effect, a sub-industry of Frenchy’s—which, in her case, meant Guy’s Frenchy’s. Kate, who was born and raised in Liverpool, lived elsewhere for some years. For a while, she was a member of a touring puppeteer troupe. She spent thirteen years in England, part of that time teaching in an art-and-design college in London. She had always had an interest in costumes and fabrics and couture. When she returned to the South Shore, where she eventually decided to stay in order to be near her elderly mother, she set herself up in Mahone Bay, a town that attracts some tourists, as a producer of custom-made garments for women—an occupation she found stupefyingly labor-intensive. What Kate decided to do the summer before last, beginning in a Mahone Bay shop, was to sell high-end clothing that could be described as secondhand if you counted Frenchy’s as the firsthand.

Kate’s enterprise was based on the fact that Frenchy’s, most of whose customers are presumably people of modest means trying to clothe their families in the most economical way possible, has in its inventory garments that appeal to an entirely different clientele—urban career women, for instance, who needed any number of outfits for the office. Over the years, it has become increasingly obvious that some such people already shop at Frenchy’s. In a 2001 book, “The Frenchy’s Connection,” two self-described addicts named Pat Wilson and Kris Wood talk about regularly spotting BMWs in Frenchy’s parking lots—presumably transportation for well-off women from Halifax or even Toronto who yearned not only for bargains but for the thrill of the hunt. House guests on the South Shore are sometimes sent off to Frenchy’s as a rainy-day tourist attraction, the way they might be sent off to the Fisheries Museum, in Lunenburg. There are stories about people taking a “Frenchy’s tour of the province.” There are relatively sophisticated summer people in Nova Scotia whose response to being complimented on an item of clothing is to smile knowingly and say, “Frenchy’s” —or “Chez François.”

At the Guy’s Frenchy’s stores that Kate patronizes, not much of the inventory is tattered or stained, although all of it is wrinkled. (Some people think that the wrinkling comes simply from being squeezed into bales, but I’m drawn to the theory that Frenchy’s has a wrinkling center, where all the clothes are put through specially designed wrinkling machines.) The stores do not have a thrift-shop aroma. Still, Kate is aware that many knowledgeable shoppers who love bargains would not shop at Frenchy’s. Some of them see tedium rather than adventure in picking through dozens of wrinkled blouses in the hope of finding that wrinkled Prada or Pierre Cardin blouse that’s in mint condition and precisely their size. Some of them don’t like to be seen in a store that sells clothes of uncertain origin. For such shoppers, Kate intended to act as a sort of editor.

You could say that Frenchy’s sells garments for about what they are worth at that stage of their life, just before they become rags. Shorn of the value added by advertising and display and fashion and design, after all, a blouse is just some fabric with armholes. Kate endeavored to put some of the value back on. She would look for good labels or good fabrics or good colors. She would clean and press. She would display on racks in a tasteful setting. At Frenchy’s prices, of course, she could take an eight-hundred-per-cent markup and still sell a designer-label skirt for under thirty dollars.

After Kate went into business, I became increasingly attuned to reports of discoveries made at Frenchy’s—an Oscar de la Renta jacket, a Gucci purse, a linen coat by Kenzo, a Vera Wang evening gown. A year ago, my friend Philip bought a new Calvin Klein overcoat at the Guy’s Frenchy’s in Yarmouth; he has never actually worn it, but the pride he takes in what he paid for it seems more than worth the purchase price, considering that all overcoats were then eight dollars. (They have since gone up to nine.) My friend Robin, who grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in the province during the summer, told me that a nephew of his in Halifax, who always seemed to be beautifully turned out, acknowledges that he owes his dapperness to regular calls at Frenchy’s. For the past few winters, Robin himself has been swanning around Manhattan in an Yves Saint Laurent overcoat that, when he bought it, at the Guy’s Frenchy’s in Shelburne, still had its pockets stitched up. As I listened to these tales of triumphant discovery or gazed at the sparkling line of beautifully pressed and artfully arranged garments in Kate’s shop, it began to occur to me that in Frenchy’s rather broad customer base there might be a place for me. That’s where William Paley came in.

Yes, that William Paley—the late founder of CBS. In 1990, a biography of Paley written by Sally Bedell Smith portrayed him as someone who, though perhaps not terribly admirable as a human being, managed to lead a life that did not include, say, waiting in line at the motor-vehicle bureau. The detail that stuck with me was that when the Paleys went to their house in the Caribbean they merely got on the plane—a private plane, as I remember—and left, secure in the knowledge that all the clothes they needed were already there. William Paley, of course, had resources that I don’t have. But he didn’t have one resource that I do have: Frenchy’s. These days, I step out a bit more in the summer than I did in the Mildew era, when we thought of Nova Scotia principally as a place where we had our girls to ourselves. When I’m invited to dinner by Philip and his wife, Cynthia, for instance—that would qualify as the bright lights in our part of the world—I like to show up in clean khakis and a shirt with a collar. What I realized sometime in July of 2005 was this: for a certain outlay of capital—the outlay I had in mind was twenty-five or thirty dollars—I could, in Paley fashion, just show up in Nova Scotia in the spring without packing or trying to remember if there were already shirts in the bureau. The private plane was a detail I’d have to work out later.

Where could all these shirts have come from? I wondered when I got back to the Nova Scotia house this past summer. There were shirts from Brooks Brothers and from L. L. Bean and from Geoffrey Beene and from the Gap and from Eddie Bauer and from Abercrombie & Fitch. There were shirts with labels I’d never heard of. There was even a shirt with the subtle but unmistakable logo of its manufacturer on the breast pocket, in flat contravention of my personal ban on wearing advertisements. (Levi’s are, it almost goes without saying, grandfathered.) For a moment, I entertained the possibility that some prankster, aware of my Paley Plan, had crept into the house in my absence bearing armloads of shirts from Frenchy’s. Then, thinking back realistically on the previous summer, I faced the fact that I must have allowed myself to drift from the prudent building of a summer shirt supply into a Frenchy’s frenzy—often the first step, I’d heard, toward a full-blown Frenchy’s addiction.

Talk of Frenchy’s was still in the air. At a dinner for Cynthia’s birthday, Kate presented the birthday girl with a stunning sweater by Eskandar. Kate, who had carted off dozens of trash bags full of clothing from Guy’s Frenchy’s during the winter, was excited about plans to expand her operation. She’d had the garage of her house in Liverpool converted into an attractive showroom called Killam Studio to serve local customers by appointment. On a trip to Toronto, she had flogged a number of garments to a high-end consignment shop, and she had her eye on similar shops in New York. She was hoping to have a Web site online by the end of the summer. One morning, I accompanied her to the Guy’s Frenchy’s in Liverpool just to watch her in action: working her way steadily through the sweater bin or the blouse bin, she seemed to be in a sort of focussed high, like a .340 hitter in the batting cage.

With Philip and Cynthia and our friend Jean, I took a trip to the part of Nova Scotia called the French Shore— ostensibly to eat in a restaurant in Grosse Coques that was said to be a refutation of the notion that Maritime Acadians are the only French-speaking people in the world who can’t cook, but partly to check out a couple of Frenchy’s stores right where the original rag man, Edwin Theriault, had begun his operation. (We found that, compared with the Guy’s Frenchy’s stores we were accustomed to, they tended toward what you might call thriftshopishness.) When I was in Liverpool or Bridgewater for errands, I still found myself dropping by the Guy’s Frenchy’s. Why? Certainly not because I needed shirts. As far as I could calculate, by estimating the average life span of a sports shirt and factoring in the number of times I might need to wear one on the South Shore, I had enough shirts on hand in Nova Scotia to last me approximately sixty-five years. I was in the market, I’d decided, for some additional outerwear that I could furnish visitors in nasty weather, and I did buy a sort of pullover windbreaker that bore the logo of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. Now and then, I’ll confess, I’d cruise by the shirt table, just for old times’ sake.

Then, while looking for slickers in the Liverpool Guy’s Frenchy’s one day, I spotted something on the overcoat rack. I obviously had no need for an overcoat in Nova Scotia. A warning bell went off in my head: If, in resupplying my New York wardrobe, I dropped down a notch from outlets in Maine to Guy’s Frenchy’s in Liverpool, was the Salvation Army thrift shop the next stop? I took the coat off the rack anyway. I could see that it was new. It was one of those lined trenchcoats of the sort I’d been wearing since college—the sort that is supposed to make you look like Humphrey Bogart playing a foreign correspondent. Instead of being the conventional dun color, though, it was a dark blue, almost black. That was a change, but a change I thought I could handle. The coat had a substantial fur lining, so it was perfect for evenings that were too cold for my dun-colored trenchcoat but too warm for the sub-Arctic parka I got twenty years ago from Eddie Bauer—a responsible company that, as I understand our arrangement, would even now return the full purchase price if I should perish from exposure while wearing the coat in temperatures warmer than thirty degrees below zero. The fur lining of the trenchcoat was itself dark blue, almost black. The label said Bill Blass. The coat was my size. I plonked down the nine dollars, plus tax. When I got back to the house, I tried on my new coat in front of a full-length mirror. It was perfect. I could imagine myself wearing it in New York—perhaps meeting up on a brisk November night with Robin in his Yves Saint Laurent. Both of us might nod toward our coats and say, “Chez François.” As I took the coat off, I heard myself murmur, “Swayve dog.” ♦

Calvin Trillin has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1963, when the magazine published “An Education in Georgia,” an account of the desegregation of the University of Georgia.